Critics ‘Stomp on the Bubbles' Of City's Education Award

Days after accepting a prestigious education prize, the Bloomberg administration is receiving a lashing for its leadership of the public schools from city and state officials, including several now eyeing Mayor Bloomberg's office. The state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, attacked the city for weak oversight of charter schools, while his city counterpart, William Thompson Jr., issued an audit condemning the schools for underreporting violent crimes.

Two other top officials — the City Council speaker, Christine Quinn, and the city's public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum — kicked off plans to study possible ways to slash the mayor's control of the city schools after Mr. Bloomberg exits in 2009.

Also, Council Member William de Blasio condemned the Bloomberg administration for failing to report complaints about abuse that occurred on school buses.

"None of these announcements alone is unimportant, but the timing seems obviously tied to this week's good news for the school system," the executive director of the nonprofit Democrats for Education Reform, Joseph Williams, said, referring to the prestigious Broad Prize awarded to Mr. Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, Tuesday in Washington, D.C. "It's as if the big news with the Broad Prize has turned Mayor Bloomberg and Joel Klein into bubble wrap, and people can't help but want to stomp on the bubbles until they are all popped."

A state charter school advocate, Peter Murphy, ridiculed the complaints, singling out Mr. DiNapoli's audit on oversight of charter schools for considering bureaucratic details rather than whether students are actually learning. "I guess there's a yearning for going back to the halcyon days of effectiveness for the Board of Education," he joked. "My word, I hope people's memories are better than that."

The comptroller's report argues that the education department's oversight of its charter schools' performance was often lax, with some performance school reports flat-out missing and others accepted even though they did not have basic enrollment and test score data. The audit, which looked at data from between 2000 and 2005, recommends ramping up oversight.

A spokesman, David Cantor, said the department began changing its oversight to match "best practices" before the audit began.

He also dismissed Mr. Thompson's report as deliberately exaggerating the seriousness of unreported incidents and "cherry-picking" a sample of just 10 schools, and said Mr. de Blasio's concerns resurrect reports of school bus abuse that have been long resolved.

Told about the charter school oversight report, a senior fellow at the Fordham Foundation, Chester Finn, said investigators sometimes look at charter schools more closely than traditional public schools for political reasons. "You've got to ask whether this is part of a conspiracy to delegitimize charter schools," he said.

Greg Richmond, the president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, which writes professional standards for charter school oversight, said he disagreed with many of Mr. DiNapoli's recommendations, including a suggestion to mandate "corrective action" for poorly performing schools. He called the recommendations an attempt to push Mr. Bloomberg "into a bureaucratic box."

A spokesman for Mr. DiNapoli, Dennis Tompkins, said the focus on the city was an accident of scheduling. Audits of the other authorizers will come "eventually," he said. He said he could not name a date.